The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank prides himself on being, what he calls, a “gleeful provocateur.” He’s not only gleeful, he’s “equal opportunity” — provoking the entire political spectrum, from left to right, and at the same time, presenting a challenge for a traditional newspaper trying to take risks.

Liberal bloggers recently pounced on Milbank after he and Post reporter Chris Cillizza produced a controversial Web video that included a low blow regarding Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among jibes at other political figures. The video was quickly pulled, and the “Mouthpiece Theater” Web series was killed less than a week later.

That comes on the heels of bloggers assailing Milbank before and after his CNN debate with The Huffington Post’s Nico Pitney. In an on-camera exchange, Pitney called the Post scribe’s work “pathetic.” And Milbank, according to Pitney, called the Huffington Post writer a “d—k” after the segment.

It’s not the first time Milbank has ruffled feathers. Before becoming an observational columnist in 2005, Milbank was the Post’s White House reporter during then-President George W. Bush’s first term. And during those years, when Milbank's coverage was intended as news, Bush administration officials were griping to editors at The Washington Post.

In 2004, The New Yorker reported that Ari Fleischer, Karen Hughes and Karl Rove all complained to Milbank’s editor, while the reporter couldn’t get calls returned from the White House. National Review published a critical piece about his reporting on the Bush White House that year, titled, “The Opinion Journalism of Dana Milbank.” Conservative bloggers attacked after one of Milbank’s somewhat snarky pool reports became public, and the reporter once told the Columbia Journalism Review that Bush’s nickname for him was “not printable in a family publication.”

Two years later, Milbank provoked conservatives after donning a bright orange hat and vest on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, for a segment discussing Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting mishap.

These days, Milbank isn’t even welcomed on Olbermann’s show. Last year, Milbank fell out of favor following a column describing Obama as the “presumptuous nominee” — which used a quote Democrats said was taken out of context — and making a flattering comment about a McCain adviser. Milbank took an analyst job with Campbell Brown’s CNN show, which airs at the same time as Olbermann’s.

Milbank told POLITICO that the recent criticism from the left is “almost exactly a mirror image” of what he got from the right during the Bush years.

“What I have noticed is that the conservatives have been saying, ‘He’s just not funny.‘ And now the left wing is saying, ‘He’s just not funny,’” Milbank said. “Either they’re driven by partisan animus or I’m just not that funny.”

The New York Times’s Peter Baker, a former colleague at the Post, described Milbank as “an equal opportunity offender.”

“He fearlessly lampoons all of us,” Baker said. “Half of his columns are mocking reporters. That’s what makes him great. He opposes the hypocrisies and pompousness and absurdities of Washington.”

Within the Post, staffers generally consider Milbank to be a talented writer, but one who could use more oversight from editors. And his videos that poked fun at colleagues weren’t always been viewed favorably inside the paper.

Following the cancellation of “Mouthpiece Theater”— as can be expected from such public debacles — the higher-ups quickly put new rules in place for vetting videos. But will that keep Milbank in line? For years, the Post writer has been pushing the envelope and making plenty of work for the ombudsman.

In 2005, after drawing heat for describing a group of anti-war activists as “wing nuts,” Milbank told then-ombudsman Michael Getler that he’s trying to “excise any trace of colorful or provocative writing from the Post.”

On Sunday, ombudsman Andy Alexander weighed in on the “Mouthpiece Theater” series, describing it as “fatally flawed.” And yet, Alexander wrote that the paper “needs risk-takers and pioneers in new media.”

Milbank, in an online chat, talked about what went wrong with the video series before asking readers for ideas on how to make the platform work for the Post.

Crowdsourcing might be the best option, because within the Post, as with other traditional newspapers, there’s little certainty about how to compete in the Internet age. Can newspapers reporters shift to new mediums, like video, without looking like they’re trying too hard? Will the “edginess” detract from the established brand?

There’s been debate recently within the Post over whether the paper should cover the same news event — a committee hearing, perhaps — with both a straight news report on A1 and a Milbank column. Is it redundant to do both, or necessary since the Washington Sketch column doesn't provide the inverted pyramid style one might expect on the front page of The Washington Post?

Milbank, as in his book “Homo Politicus,” tries humorously sifting through the various tribes within Washington’s government-media apparatus — and the Washington Sketch videos seemed a logical extension of the column. In some videos, Milbank acts as cultural anthropologist, who in a Rod Serling-pose introduces the audience to strange, phenomenon; in others, he’s the frathouse cutup among professional journalists. (Beer funnel? Check!)

But as Cillizza later admitted, and colleagues agreed, the “Mouthpiece Theater” series wasn’t very funny. That’s why a satirical video, “Two Dudes and a Webcam,” was so biting and quickly wound up on blogs knocking the Milbank-Cillizza project. It depicted an old media institution desperately trying to be hip, with the jokes falling flat. (And have most members of the YouTube generation ever seen an episode of the original “Masterpiece Theater"?)

Even staffers who didn’t think the series was funny, or reflected well upon the paper, didn’t feel it deserved such scorn. With regards to the offending video, one female Post staffer chalked it up to "a case of contrarianness run amok, not malice."

Even though Milbank’s role is to bring some fizz into the otherwise staid columns, Center for American Progress senior fellow Eric Alterman, who’s written critically of Milbank — along with much of New York and Washington’s elite media world — sees Milbank as old media, not new. The Post writer, he wrote in an e-mail to POLITICO, is “a nearly perfect representative of much, if not almost everything, that’s objectionable about the MSM.”

Similarly, many liberal bloggers viewed the debate with Pitney through the prism of old media vs. new media, where Milbank — one who often pillories the press corps — has become the poster boy for a curmudgeonly Fourth Estate.

Milbank says his criticism of Pitney’s question had to do with the fact that the reporter and White House officials discussed possibly getting a question on Iran the night before a presidential press conference. It wasn’t, he said, about “new, old, left, right.” Milbank’s beef in a nutshell: “I just don’t like people getting too cozy with the people they cover.”

Post Style writer Hank Stuever said Milbank thrives when “poking the self-importance of this town.” That’s a broad target — one that a traditional newspaper may not be able to hit with comedy.